Garrett Gerloff On Provisonal Pole For Daytona 200

By Paul Carruthers | 3/14/2014 7:24 AM

Photography by Larry Lawrence
The stage has been set for this afternoon’s final qualifying for Saturday’s Daytona 200 at Daytona International Speedway with Y.E.S./Monster Graves Yamaha’s Garrett Gerloff leading the way in this morning’s first qualifying session.

Gerloff lapped at a best of 1:50.531 on his 16th lap, which was almost a second better than his best from yesterday when he led the second practice session. Gerloff bested the Castrol Triumph of Jason DiSalvo by .881 of second and third-placed Jake Gagne, on the RaodRace Factory Yamaha R6, by .995 of a second.

There was a drop-off in lap times from there on down with Y.E.S./Monster Graves Yamaha’s JD Beach fourth fastest, but 1.8 seconds behind his teammate Gerloff.

Danny Eslick ended up fifth on the Riders Discount Racing Triumph. Eslick was a tick over two seconds off Gerloff’s pace.

Both Steve Rapp and Blake Young missed out on the top 20 cutoff to run with the fast guys in the qualifying session. Rapp had machine issues and Young suffered a crash on his second lap and spent the majority of the session watching his GN Gonzales Racing team rebuild his R6. He got back on track with five minutes to go, but wasn’t able to improve.

Paul Carruthers took over as the editor of Cycle News in 1993 after serving as associate editor since starting his career at the publication in 1985. Carruthers has covered every facet of the sport in his near-28-year tenure at America’s Daily Motorcycle News Source.